Notwithstanding
some earlier
controversy, the child medium/Kumari cult in
Nepal is alive and well. Simply stated most of the lay population believes
that one or another of the Kumaris can bestow "blessings" and receiving
tika (the red paste mark on the forehead of a devotee) from one of them
is important to many.In that context she is seen as the personification
of several of the valley goddess including Taleju, Vajrayogini Guhyeshvari
and others. All three cities in Nepal, Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur have
Kumari institutions dating from the Malla period and possibly before.

There are other
Kumaries as well, depending on who is counting somewhere between thirteen
and fifteen all of them from the Shakya families of the Newar Buddhist
communities. The Kathmandu Kumari furthermore, has been giving tika to
the kings of the valley as a mark of her (i.e., the goddesses' acceptance
of the monarch) as a sign of legitimacy for centuries.

It is generally
accepted that the ceremonies in their present form were inaugurated in
mid-eighteenth century by Jaya Prakash Malla, the last of the 'Newar' kings.

Child possession
or Svasthavesa (literally "possession of one who is in a good state of
[mental and physical] health) is considered “positive" versus opportunistic
possession of one who is ill, the ayurvedic category of agantuka
considered a pathology induced from without by demonic grahas ‘seizers’.

The Himalayan
Saiva and Buddhist Tantras that mention svasthavesa are primarily dedicated
to descriptions of the worship of Siva and various goddesses. The
Saiva texts fall within a class called Siddhanta, rather than under the
better-known but highly suspect designation "Kashmir Saivism." Thus, the
texts are not the commonly cited ones , but for example Ja'adratha'amala
National Archives, Kathmandu (NAK) 5-4650; Nifvasaguh'a, NAK 1-277; Tantrasadbhava,
NAK 5-1985, and the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project (N GMPP)
AI 88/22; Brhatkalottara, NAK 1-273, plus the Buddhist Cakrasamvavarapindartha
and the Sekoddefa from eastern India.

What is striking
about svasthavesa, is the remarkable continuity of these texts with certain
early Chinese Buddhist tantric texts cited by Edward L. Davis in his volume
Society and the Supernatural in Song China(2001), and Michel Strickmann
in Chinese Magical Medicine both published (2002).

In fact the
phenomenon of child possession receives much more attention in Chinese
religious texts than in South Asian or Tibetan ones. Some compilations
of Tang dynasty stories tell of children possessed by the spirits (shen)
of learned men. Glen Dudbridge explicates several such accounts from a
genre called zhiguai (tales of the marvelous), of at least the eight century
if not before.

In the first
story, a girl named Wang Fazhi from the town of Tonglu serves the spirit
of a young man called Teng Quanyin, with whom she had an affinity in a
previous birth; she begins to experience regular possession of his spirit
before the age of five. In frequent meetings with the county magistrate,
writers and poets, and Buddhist monks, Quanyin, speaking through Fazhi,
demonstrates his literary, scholarly, and religious erudition, composing
poetry extemporaneously.

If the story
is to gain any credibility, it must be assumed that the girl was subjected
to ritually induced possession. Even if the story is to be treated as a
member of another genre-for example, didactic tales, fiction, folklore,
or an intermediate genre-we must still ask how, even in the imagination,
a five-year-old girl is able to "serve the spirit of a young man." My sense
is that this "service" must have been ritual, and ritually induced, under
the supervision of a learned master in this art. Even if the story is regarded
as pure fiction, this element of cultural background must be assumed. This
inference is based on the presence of frequent descriptions (and tales)
of oracular possession weighted toward either their narrative or ritual
components, when, in fact, in any "real" or "imagined" event, both are
assumed to be equally present. In the case at hand, the description of
the ritual must have been suppressed in favor of the narrative. As in the
Mantramahodadhi, this story does not state or imply that the erudition
revealed during possession was maintained by the girl outside the mediumistic
act. This too argues for ritually induced possession. Oracular possession
is rarely reported as a spontaneous experience; it nearly always adheres
to known, effective, and ritually adumbrated models, as mentioned several
times earlier. It is, as noted elsewhere, publicly performed, even if that
public is very small. In general, it requires an expectant and knowing
audience.

Sporadic examples
of such oracular or divinatory possession are quite ancient, as for example,
tales from the Brhadarayaka Upanishad that exhibit important resonances
with the material discussed here. It appears however, that the Chinese
ritual texts address therapeutic or exorcistic practice to a greater degree,
and with more subtle distinctions and nuances, than does the Indic material.
The Indic texts domesticate and Sanskritize practices that appear to be
derived from village spirit-mediums, women, or others of lower social rank.
The problem with the Indian material, is that the textuality, in Sanskrit,
reflects the interests of the literate brahmanical and ruling classes,
whereas in China , at least during the Song (960-1279) and Ming (1368-1644)
dynasties, the textuality was more likely to include direct accounts and
interests of a greater range of social classes.

Since there
is no evidence that the Chinese practice early on, at present they
appear to be wholly independent developments. Although answers to certain
questions might be sought by anyone in a crystal ball as it were, for example,
in water, or a mirror (called catoptromancy
in Greece), a person in an inferior social
and intellectual position was preferred because he or she could articulate
divinatory or oracular answers under the watchful and practiced eye of
the mantrin, who would, according to the conventions of hierarchy, retain
the right to censor or reinterpret the words of the oracle if they were
to appear immature, wild, or irresponsible.

During our field
research an elderly Tibetan woman (Oct.2006) was seen using an "oracular
mirror." Central to her practice is a shiny brass surface with an abstract
pattern lightly etched on it into which she stares, which serves as the
backdrop of her puja altar. The client sits on a chair in front of her
and off to her right as she sits cross-legged on an elevated cushion before
her altar. After she hears and acknowledges the question, she makes a few
offerings with rice, water, and other items, stares into the brass plating,
and answers the questions. Her answers describes images/visions she perceives,
and of course does not in imply possession, something that can be a matter
of interpretation or/and belief.

During
earlier observations Hildegard Diemberger describes how Tibetan oracles
undergo an initiation or empowerment in which certain "energy-channels"
(rtsa) are opened. “The popular perception is that impurities in the
energy-channel are responsible for aberrant behavior. Once these are ritually
purified, possession is considered to be under control and confers upon
the oracle an extraordinary competence in helping the other living beings.”(
Diemberger, "Female Oracles in Modern Tibet ." In Women in Tibet . Ed.
Janet Gyatso and Hanna Havnevik, 2005, pp. II3-168).

With the deity
or spirit in control, the oracle then resorts to mirror divination, which
"allows the gods to express themselves.” Some diaspora Tibetan monks
have seen performing similar divinations.

In India there
is even a Mughal-era painting a late sixteenth-century projection
of the use of an oracular mirror by Alexander the Great. The painting,
dating to the year 1597 and ascribed to a Hindu artist named Dharmadasa
in the court of Akbar, was a visual interpretation of part of a long Persian
poem by AmIr Khusraw of Delhi, called ".A'Inah-i Sikandarl" (Mirror of
Alexander), composed in the year 1299.(See John Seyller, Pearls of the
Parrot of India, 2001, p.19-20). The painting reproduced in John Seyller’s
book, by a Hindu at the late sixteenth-century Muslim court, portrays the
use of an oracular mirror by a Greek conqueror of fifteen centuries
earlier.

Another variant
of the practice of childhood possession, is the divinatory process employed
to discover a tulku or reincarnation of certain recently deceased lamas.
Hereination again is, the art used to forest place where the Dalai
Lamas would be born.

In Taiwan, child
mediums who are required to be illiterate, may still be found. They are
called. (divination lad), a term that implies that they are both male and
y' However, some jitong are older, and others are girls. A practice that
af to have evolved from this is still observed. Certain adult mediums in
T wear bibs designed for children in their oracular practice. This appears
commemorial, a relic from earlier times when children acted as medium.

It appears to
have originated in northern India among tantrikas affiliated with
Buddhist, Hindu, or even Jain lineages, who textualized this practice
that predated them. And this way it spread into Tibet and China at
the beginning of the seventh century. What first surfaced in north India
in the fifth to centuries was a variety of prafna that became prasenti
farther east, and an assortment of prayogas in South India . The description
of the ritual, is a use of children in oracular posture.

This broad conformity
sparks several questions. Were specific possession cults transnational?
Was Asian, especially Indian, religion organized along more microscopic
definitions of lineage than I had hitherto believed? And if so, what sorts
of identifiable historical forces could account for this organization?

It is likely,
that a fair amount of material on possession, and probably svasthavefa,
remains buried in collections of unexamined tantric manuscripts housed
in personal and institutional libraries in south India .

For example
in Tamilnadu, Karnataka, and much of southern and coastal Andhra Pradesh
the Sailkaracaryas authorized the domestication and transformation of "left-handed"
practices involving Tripura and other goddesses, assigning them an advaitic
and, therefore, "right-handed" trajectory. In fact also the above cited
Kumari tradition in Nepal, kumArI-pUjA or virgin-worship is already mentioned
in the Tamil work Cilappatik Aram w.r.t. the cult of goddess Aiyai.

Yet possession
ritual is documented in China from the mid-first millennium B.C.E. onward,
and scholars point to artistic and epigraphical evidence that might push
that date back another millennium. Most of this speculation revolves around
the issue of shamanism, which, because of cultural variation and lack of
perspicacious definitions, falls prey to the same sort of amorphous characterization
(and caricature) as befalls Tantra.

But Strickmann
and Davis also cite several texts that contain material strongly reminiscent
of Indic and Tibetan avesa and svasthavesa. Indeed, the Chinese employ
the word aweishe , a direct transcription of avesa, "to designate possession
rites in which a spirit was invoked into the living body of a medium. The
term might also apply to procedures in which the spirit of a living person
was co-opted, so to speak, into the pantheon." (Strickmann 2002, p.208).

According to
Strickmann, the Amoghapafasutra, which was translated from Sanskrit into
Chinese around the end of the seventh century, was the first Chinese Buddhist
text to give instructions for inducing deity possession. It was at this
point, says Strickmann, that a "new Tantric synthesis was about to become
known in China " (Strickmann 2002, p.204).

The purpose
of this aweishe ritual, which invokes Guanyin (= Avalokitesvara), was therapeutic,
to heal an individual suffering from spirit-induced illness.

Some of the
cited texts cite children ‘o gaze into a mirror.’Davis excerpts
part of a Buddhist tantra that records the possession of a boy by (daozhe)
the monk who wrote the text he stared at. The boy is said to have jumped
and flung about, grabbed a sword, run out of the temple gate until he reach
of cow dung, struck the pile three times with his sword, leads Davis to
conclude that in this episode: we are far from the highly controlled, rarefied,
atmosphere of the Buddhist avesa rites, in which two or more purified
children stood passively before the master amidst incense and strewn
flowers; in which the descent of the divinity a onset of trance were distinguishable
only by the most subtle of signs like cessation of breathing, unblinking
eyes, and a slight reddish tint the pupils; and in which the children had
in essence become living as luminescent, but also as confined, as the pearl
or crystal for which were substitutes.(Davis 2001, p. 128).

The "basic structure
of the Tang rituals of avesa," says Davis, is "the controlled possession
of a boy by a cultic divinity and his subsequent clairvoyance." (Davis
2001, p. 140)

However
this is a feature not only of Himalayan Saiva ta practice, but of subcontinental
Indian devotionalism (bhakti), as evident in both mid-first-millennium
Tamil devotional poetry and contemporaneous Sanskrit counterparts. It is
replicated in the devotional fervor characteristic of Esoteric Buddhism.
The devotional impulse ( bhiiva) expressed most decisively in the Vaisnava
literature of the subcontinent (example the Bhagavata Purana) is heavily
implicated in the development of Esoteric Buddhism.

The procedures
for employing children for divinatory purposes in India thus were not limited
to a shadowy presence in a few obscure, regionally specific texts. This
is similar to the situation in China, where it was relatively widespread,
as Davis 's extensive documentation shows. However, even if the practice
was not as widespread in India as in China, corroborative evidence from
other Tantras shows that it spread beyond the confines of a few local cults.
At any rate, knowledge of it appears to have entered into more mainstream,
prescribing three tantric rituals to be performed on children.

The first states
that after cutting the umbilical cord, the sadhaka (the father?, a hired
tantrika?) should inscribe a mantra for Vacaspati, the Lord of Speech,
on the tongue of the newborn child with a sharp blade of diirva grass that
had been dipped in gorocana, an extrusion from the biliary tract of a cow
(either a large gallstone or a bezoar), which is used for tantric and alchemical
purposes in India. Upon reaching the age of eight, the child will then
become proficient in all sastras (sarvasastrajfiata). Purpose of these
offerings, certainly, was to attract spirits or minor deity enter the child,
either permanently or temporarily.But children
may have been used because they were regarded as pure, as em bodiments
of moral neutrality, and because youtl1 itself was regarded as a natural
restorative. The single scrap of supporting evidence for this is found
in Kalkin Pundarika's Vimalaprabha on me Laghukalacakratantra, which
specifies that a virgin's (kumarika) success in this ritual, which enables
her to predict events of the past, present, and future based on visions
seen in an oracular mirror (pratisenadarse), is due only in part to the
grace of the guru or presiding acarya. Equally important is the fact that
she has not yet experienced sexual union. Pundarika rejects the view that
it is the acarya's grace (acaryaprasadah) alone that causes the virgin
to be empowered by the deity of the mantra. He suggests, instead, that
if the acarya has the ability to empower the girl, he ought to be able
to empower himself as well, thus gaining the ability to answer questions
as an oracle. But this does not occur, notes Pundarlka: The acarya is not
able to generate the visions that produce in himself oracular skill.However since
the democratization in Nepal also more and more adult women, started
to establish themselves as mediums. This has become a new and viable
wage-earning opportunity for women in certain oppressively patriarchal
rural areas of Nepal-not a trivial factor in the general empowerment offered
by possession. Nevertheless, in spite of similar dynamics of cultural legitimization,
the personal empowerment experienced by New Age trance channelers displays
a considerably different texture from that experienced by women and others
of lower social rank in developing societies whose possession is a temporary
expression of social or political dominance in a general climate of oppression.

Further comparison
can be made between New Age trance channeling and spirit mediumship in
developing countries. A strong difference however in the case of Nepal
for example, lie in the imperatives of need, the synchronicities of oppression,
or long-term religious or spiritual commitment, while the former, New Age
channeling workshops and even correspondence courses, are a "product" arising
from media-based culture (the ready availability of books and videotapes
by trance channelers) and widespread prosperity.

This is rapidly
changing however, in Taiwan, Oceania, and probably South Asia as well the
attendance at oracular and festival possession events today (Dec.2006)
are much more a matter of choice than of local tradition. Thus the
fact that possession and its incumbent empowerment are the rather "natural"
property of the oppressed can now be said to already be disproved,
not only in the West that is.